July 2008

Well, everyone is talking about the new search engine, Cuil and it shows. The new search engine pronounced ‘cool’ and comes from an old Irish word meaning ‘knowledge’. The site has indexed around 120 billion web pages, which it claims is three times more than any other search engine, and results are organised by ideas rather than just rankings. It also promises complete user privacy. Cuil will attempt to analyse the context of each page and the concepts behind each query, thereby grouping similar results together and sorting them by category.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

but bbc says ..

By declaring its aim of taking on Google, Cuil joins a long list of others that have tried and largely failed to dent the search giant’s market share. Other contenders include Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset.

Weird fact is, it does not even find one result on a usual search term.

BitLet is a experimental java based online service which offers free service of torrent downloading without a client on our computer. You can choose options like incoming Port and maximum upload rate. But unfortunately this is only good for leechers as it does not have a upload/seeding service as yet.

To download the torrent file you choose, right click on the download torrent link, copy the link location (e.g. http://www.example.org/file.torrent) and then paste it in the input box at bitlet.org. Then you have only to click on “Download torrent” button. Simple enough.

Knol is new service by Google, an authoritative article about a specific topic. Though, as of now its mostly about medical and health articles.

Google says,

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

A feature called “moderated collaboration” is introduced for authors to work together. With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content.

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

Link : Knol : A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.

Vuzit is a new service that allows you to embed pdf’s into your site in a slick AJAX powered viewer. It allows content publishers to embed documents in their web pages, similar to how YouTube distributes video, thus maintaining consistent branding and site navigation. Vuzit provides publishers with tools to display documents alongside other web content and systems (e.g. advertising and analytics).